Being an account of a DBA3 battle between two novice players, using armies I/52c Thessalian Hoplites and I/52f Later Athenian Hoplites

The Horse Lords of Thessaly test the Resolve of the Brave Athenian Free Men

Davgraios Ravages Greek Villages

The horse-loving people of the Thessalian Plains were angry. Or maybe hungry. Whatever the unspecified complaint or motivation, an army of horsemen and hoplites and the general’s handpicked heavy cavalry ravaged southward from their homeland towards the plains and villages of Noble Athens, ransacking farms and villages along the way. Their leader General Davgraios was finally brought to battle at the entrance to the Flaxen Fields north of Athens, by the shore of the gulf of Evvoia.

The good citizens of Athens had voted Artificos the Brazen – so named for his splendid bronze cuirass and helm, and not in any way his penchant for grandiose speechifying – as their field commander in this defence of their realm. He assembled a traditional army of well-bred citizen spearmen with their characteristic large circular ‘hoplon’ shield and shining linen body armour, supported by enthusiastic bands of young men skirmishing with little more than slings and throwing javelins. Unable to field as many skirmish bands as he needed, Artificos resorted to employing a band of mercenary cavalry to provide increased mobility.

Armies Assemble

The Athenian hoplite array deployed traditionally in line abreast, across the width of the Flaxen Fields, their right flank protected by the shores of the gulf of Evvoia, and their left flank protected by lines of skirmishing youth. Knowing the Thessalians to be prone to looting and raids on helpless baggage trains, Artificos had cunningly sent three units of his troops offshore in ships from the famous Athenian ‘Wooden Wall’, to allow a seaborne attack on the Thessalian rear if the horsemen failed to protect their own baggage.

And thus indeed did it occur. Davgraios deployed his small hoplite line in array between two thick woods, with skirmishers on both flanks. His three light horse elements he placed in a column further to his right, ready to charge down outside the woods and fall on the Athenian left flank, or, more likely, avoid the battle altogether and sack the Athenian baggage train in search of loot and food and slaves.

The general’s own cavalry unit he placed behind his main hoplite line, within sight of all his troops, but unable to attack or be attacked. And, despite messages from his spies warning of troop-laden Athenian ships offshore, he placed his baggage train in a narrow space behind one of the woods and beside the sandy beach.

Taking advantage of the placement of the Thessalian baggage train, Artificos sent his ships to disembark the mercenary cavalry and two staunch hoplite bands on the beach next to the enemy baggage. This was a risky decision, since these units would be unsupported for quite some time before the slow-moving Athenian hoplite lines could hope to reach them.

First Blood

The battle began with the charge of the Athenian cavalry into the Thessalian baggage train. Amid much shouting and, reportedly, singing of obscure folk songs by the good women of the encampment, the Athenian cavalry lost all cohesion and raced off northwards, apparently with willing passengers.

(Athenian cavalry destroyed. Athens=0 : Thessaly=1)

After-battle interviews with the hoplites who observed this suggest that in their urgent need to replace unavailable skirmishers, Artificos’ recruiters had hired a band of mercenary Thessalian cavalry. Already homesick and seasick from the time spent waiting offshore on the Athenian triremes, they were then sent to sack the baggage train of their own people! They were torn between their mercenary love of loot if they pressed the attack, and the promise of home cooking, firm ground beneath their horses’ feet and less chance of being stabbed if they deserted. Lacking the honour and discipline of staunch Athenian free citizens, they chose to select brides and head home to Thessaly.

While the marine landing was occurring at the Thessalian rear, the Athenian skirmishers on the left of the Athenian line raced forwards to take up positions within the woods overlooking the Thessalians. From here they could threaten, insult and annoy the Thessalian main line, while being protected from the enemy light horse column, which would not enjoy fighting in the trees.

Thessalians run about a lot

The Thessalian light horse column predictably ignored the main battle line and the nearby Athenian skirmishers, and galloped around the forest. Aiming to outflank the now-unsupported Athenian hoplites, they galloped so far and so fiercely that they lacked the energy to charge to contact. They rested, still in column formation, beyond the range of any Athenian countercharge.

The skirmishers on the Thessalian left flank saw their own baggage train in peril. Spurred on by the furious bellowing of their leader Davgraios, two units of skirmishers sprinted through the forest to try to support their food supplies and camp followers.

General Davgraios also charged towards the baggage train, only to realise that there was not enough space to get his cavalry past the baggage train without sending some of the horsemen through the woods. Unwilling to risk his own unit being charged by the fearsome Athenian hoplites while bogged down in the woods, he halted his horsemen behind the baggage train. Here, again, he could neither attack nor be attacked.

Athenians skilfully manoeuvre

With the hairy Thessalian light horse threatening the left flank of the Athenian hoplite line, the three nearest hoplite units turned to face the horsemen. Although too slow to form a proper hoplite line at right angles to their original deployment, they split up and managed to cover each other’s flanks so the horsemen would not be able to surround any one hoplite unit.

The right side of the Athenian line wheeled slightly to line general Artificos up with the Thessalian main hoplite line, which was still standing motionless between its protective forests.

Up at the Thessalian baggage train debacle, the disciplined Athenian hoplites moved from column formation to proper line abreast, while shouting imprecations at the traitorous departing cavalry. Their calmness began to put fear in the hearts of the skirmishers, and even, it seems, the general Davgraios himself.

Thessalians avoid battle

On the Athenian left flank, the Thessalian light horse had rested from their impetuous gallop. Seeing no easy prey in the hoplite spears before them, they shouted unintelligible insults and charged instead toward the Athenian baggage train. Once again, they galloped so fast that they lacked the breath to carry the attack. They stopped just outside the baggage train, well out of range of the hoplites they had just contemptuously ridden around.

At the other end of the battlefield, Davgraios’ skirmishers near the baggage train moved further through the woods in an attempt to protect their camp. Like the light horse, they were unwilling to risk themselves against the hoplites, and they stayed hidden in the woods, taunting their enemies, rather than getting between their camp and the ranks of shining spears.

The Athenian Hoplites dance

The hoplites of the Athenian left flank had now been thoroughly outmanoeuvred. They each turned to the rear in pursuit of the Thessalian cavalry, which had almost reached the Athenian baggage train. It would be a long chase, but the horsemen’s concentration on loot might distract them long enough for the hoplites to pin them against the camp itself.

At the other end of the field, the two Athenian hoplite units moved purposefully toward the Thessalian camp, and the Thessalian skirmishers in the woods realised that they were about to face the massed spears of the elite free citizen-soldiers of Athens.

Thessalians attack and retreat

Finally the three Thessalian light horse units had reached an enemy that didn’t make them quake in their boots. All three attacked the Athenian baggage train, thoroughly surrounding it. The Athenian camp followers, cooks and baggage handlers gave a good account of themselves – they had been watching the light horse avoid all combat, so they didn’t feel very threatened! – and the battle was inconclusive.

Davgraios had seen the Athenian hoplites form up and march towards his baggage train. The thought occurred to him that being captured or killed by the hoplites would put a kink in his dinner engagement plans, so he tactically repositioned himself back towards his main hoplite line, giving a no-doubt rousing speech to motivate the nervous skirmishers he left to protect the baggage.

Athenians get aggressive

Time was running out as night approached. The Athenians needed to repel this unwarranted attack quickly or the Thessalians would escape to continue sacking the Athenian countryside.

The Athenian skirmishers in the woods on the Athenian left charged out to attack their opposite numbers. Disorganisation ensued as some of the Thessalian skirmishers were pushed back out of their line, but no units were destroyed.

The hoplites in pursuit of the light horse moved towards them at all speed, but were still too far away to make contact.

The seaborne Athenian hoplite line attacked the Thessalian baggage train and the nearest skirmishers, who happened to be perfectly lined up. The mighty spears overpowered the camp followers – leaving the camp undefended – and forced the skirmishers to recoil further into the woods.

(Thessalian camp followers destroyed. Athens=1 : Thessaly=1)

Loot-obsessed Thessalian Light Horse

The three light horse units overpowered and destroyed the Athenian camp followers on their second attempt, still with their backs to the approaching Athenian hoplites.

(Athenian camp followers destroyed. Athens=1 : Thessaly=2)

In the chaotic melee of skirmishers on the Athenian left flank, one of the Thessalian hoplite units managed to flank one of the brave Athenian skirmishers who was engaged with his opposite number. Forced to recoil while flanked by the hoplites, the Athenian skirmishers were destroyed.

(Athenian skirmisher destroyed. Athens=1:Thessaly:3)

They can’t run forever

The Athenian hoplites chasing the Thessalian light horse finally caught them while the horsemen were busy attacking the Athenian camp. Although the light horse turned about face to receive the hoplite charge, they were overwhelmed and forced backwards into the chaos of the camp. All unit cohesion disintegrated as the horses became tangled in the tent guy ropes and burnt by cooking fires.

(Thessalian Light Horse destroyed. Athens=2 : Thessaly=3)

With no-one opposing them, the hoplites who previously destroyed the Thessalian camp followers then sacked the baggage train.

(Thessalian baggage train sacked. Athens=3 : Thessaly=3)

Also in the forest near the sacked Thessalian camp, one of the Athenian hoplite units managed to force a Thessalian skirmisher to recoil while outflanked, destroying it.

(Thessalian Skirmishers destroyed. Athens=4:Thessaly=3)

Peace is Restored and Honour Satisfied

Now that the Thessalians had lost all their baggage, their camp followers, and their most enthusiastic loot-obsessed light horse and most energetic skirmishers, the main Thessalian battle line chose to leave the field, most of them without even getting their cloaks rumpled.

Learn-To-Sew Books Don’t Appeal To Blokes

They don’t even pretend to be aimed at blokes. There are all sorts of theories and practical reasons for why that is so, but there is no doubt that it is true.

I’m a bloke. I like making stuff. I like tools. Sewing machines are the textile equivalent of a laser cutter or a 3D printer. They can make almost anything.

I’m on my second sewing machine. The first machine was 40 years old when it was given to me. It died when rats nested in it while it was stored in the garage. I bought the second machine intending to make strange and fantastic hand puppets with it. I have a shelf full of books on puppetry, most of which I have read several times. I have a shelf full of books on sewing, mostly picked up second hand, and I haven’t finished reading even one of them.

l think I’ve sewn a total of five things. In fifteen years. Why am I still so hopeless at sewing?

When I wanted to learn electronics back in the seventies, the books and kit-sellers had lots of small projects to choose from. I could pick the ones that appealed most, did something useful, or taught me a skill I was excited about. Or that I could afford on the day. When I wanted to learn programming, the books had projects that were fun, and relevant to my long-term goals – as a teenager, that meant fantasy games and science fiction simulations.

Reasons Blokes Don’t Sew

Blokes don’t have the same reasons for wanting to sew that the books and magazines assume.

We don’t score brag points with our friends for ‘creativity’ by wearing casual clothes we made ourselves. We risk ridicule by standing out like that.

Formal and business clothes for men are tailored, which no beginner can aspire to create.

We are not beholden to fashion trends. When we like our clothes we wear them til they wear out. We aren’t going to obsess over what width and shape of lapel is ‘in’ this season. We don’t care about this season’s ‘colours’. We don’t throw away our clothes every year.

We’re not going to risk female ridicule by making clothes for our kids.

Our culture doesn’t make men feel proud to be carrying on a tradition of masculinity by sewing. Even though tailoring is a traditionally masculine activity.

We can’t save money by sewing, certainly not if we take the value of our leisure time into account. Honestly, women can’t save money by sewing either – mass produced clothing is cheap.

Reasons Blokes Will Sew

Sewing, and the process of learning to sew, must make us feel good or at least feel good about ourselves, or we will do something else that does. Making tablecloths or ‘cute’ skirts is not going to do that for most blokes. Hitting stuff with a hammer does, for some doubtlessly profound evolutionary reason. Here are some reasons that seem valid to me:-

We can make useful stuff using fabrics that aren’tgirly.

We can proudly proclaim our allegiance to our various tribes.

We can make wearable platforms for the cool stuff we make with our other hobbies.

We can do stuff other blokes can’t do, using dangerous ex-industrial heavy machinery if you need the extra cred.

We can indulge our childish/childhood dreams.

We can impress those hot, smart, creative women who wear fantastic costumes to geeky sci-fi and pop-culture conventions, steampunk gatherings, Rennaissance Fairs and historical re-enaction events. Maybe not to the V8 Touring Car races or the footy. Maybe I’m not really that blokey after all.

Self-Directed Learning Projects

Here is my first draft list of vaguely graduated projects that might keep blokes motivated long enough to learn to sew.

Pressing Cloth – Every textile fabricator needs one.

It’s a rectangle of cotton hemmed on all 4 sides.

Who cares what it looks like – it is just a simple tool like a carpentry jig.

Learn to set up the sewing machine and sew a straightish line.

Bloke’s handkerchief – Just like a pressing cloth only it might be seen in public.

Use a permanent fabric marker to draw an accurate ruler and a protractor on the cloth, thus turning it into a multi-tool of sorts.

Maybe include formulae useful to your other hobbies – Newton’s laws of motion, Asimov’s laws of robotics, or the rules of Fight Club.

Crazy extra credit points for machine embroidering over the text and diagrams, making it look mad-science- or serial killer-ish.

Banzai Headband – A strip of fabric with the long edges sewn together.

Ritually tie it Ninja-like around your forehead before a crucial game of counterstrike.

Or cutting firewood with a giant chainsaw.

Or Mowing the lawn in summer. [My ‘lawn’ is several acres with dangerous slopes prone to rolling my Ride-On Mower. A bit of Ninja agility would come in handy.]

Psycho Message Necktie – Silk-screen or hand-paint the fabric.

Make a statement at your office party, political rally or fundraiser without standing out at a distance.

Support your team.

Add colour to your boring work-mandated suit.

Pressing Ham – A tool to help you press seams in hard-to-get-at places.

Basically a sort of distorted elongated cube stuffed with something heat resistant. [I read about this in a sewing book.]

Workshop Apron – Protect your comfortable man-clothes.

Deflect hot-glue, paint, sparks and sprays of molten metal in the secret supervillain machine shop. [I seem to have made two of these in High School home-economics class. No, the classes were not optional. Boys and girls all did six months each of woodwork, metalwork, sewing and cooking, in co-educational classes. At least we all left knowing what the tools looked like, and which ones were likely to impale or cut off our fingers.]

Workboot Gaiters – Tubes of fabric, with elastic at the tops.

They fit over your socks and the tops of your boots. They keep dirt, grass, insects and other rubbish out of the boots while bushwalking, brushcutting lantana, using a lawnmower.

Tool Roll – For your pushbike, motorcycle, four-wheel drive.

Customise it for the exact tools you need, and the space you have to store them in.

If you are an artist, make one to carry your brushes while protecting the bristles.

Remote Control Caddy – Hangs off the arm of your favourite chair.

Stores all your remote controls in one spot where you can find them without standing up. [Maybe you don’t need this if you have a fancy universal remote control. We have three remotes just to watch TV.]

Wallet – make your own customised hard-currency moneyholder.

Instead of making one out of Duct tape, find (or screen-print or hand paint) some cool fabric.

Passport Holder – A simpler version of the wallet, but flatter, and with more and better Faraday shielding.

[I remember when the US government mandated RF-readable passports as a ‘security measure’ for American citizens. Would you want a passport broadcasting your American-ness to the inhabitants of some backwater disputed area where the local specialty was Improvised Electronic Devices? I’m not convinced they thought that one through.]

Utility Belt – Wear it when you’re up on the roof, pruning a tree, slaloming downhill on a skateboard.

Hanging space for your tools or waterbottle

Pockets for nails, screws, snacks, SD Cards, USB sticks.

Add padding and metal studs for protection or street-cred, if that matters.

Books have been written on making bags, but blokes would need one that didn’t use the words adorable, purse, clutch, vintage, handbag, or stylish.

These vary from the dead simple to the extremely technical and demanding. You get to use all sorts of buckles, fasteners, rivets, grommets, reinforcing frames and padding.

Cargo Pants – Hard-wearing multi-pocket trousers.

These seem to have replaced jeans as the most practical clothing for low attention span blokes like me. I can carry my multi-tool, camera, altoids-tin first aid kit, sketchbook, Copic markers, wallet, loose change pouch, cable-ties… My everyday carry stuff. So the task specific stuff goes in a carry bag.

This is an ‘aspirational’ project, because it needs a lot of skill.

[When I can carry this off reliably, I’ll feel I have learnt how to sew.]

Multi-pocket Vest – The vest equivalent of cargo pants.

[I don’t wear these because my back doesn’t like carrying all the weight of my gadgetry on my shoulders. Other folks are more fit and blokey than me, or they don’t overload their pockets with heavy stuff.]

Hats and Masks – You can sew your own hats. Would you want to?

I have a couple of books on hat making – I refuse to call it millinery. Mostly the patterns are either too girly or too difficult at my limited skill level. It’s hard to compete with ready-to-wear hats unless you are doing costuming-level stuff, where there is no RTW and custom stuff is very expensive or not very robust.

Sleeping Swag – The instant tent for the rugged or the homeless.

Popular with some bikers, because you can get to your rally destination and just unroll the thing and crawl in. No ropes, guy poles or tent pegs, which is good when your fingers are so frozen you can’t feel anything.

You can pitch it under a hedge and be invisible if the social environment is hostile.

Bugging out takes only minutes.

Leave one permanently in the back of your car with your bug-out bag if you are afraid of natural disasters or TEOCAWKI.

Complex Costume Items and Accessories – This is the place that you can save money by sewing your own clothes. Eventually.

If you buy a cheap off-the-rack pirate outfit, you’ll look rubbish, you’ll be uncomfortable, and it will wear out really fast. So you’ve wasted your money.

If you buy a horrendously expensive bespoke pirate costume, it will look fantastic, it may fit you (if you went to fittings), it may be comfortable, and it may be practical.

If you develop the skills to build it yourself, you can guarantee all of the above. As I said, eventually.

Stereotypical Dark Ages clothing is relatively simple to construct but hard to research.

The modern anime/computer game idea of fantasy clothing is exotic and difficult, even if you can find the fabrics to suit.

If you want to look like a steampunk gentleman, you’ll need hard-core tailoring skills, because Victorian gentlemen were into tailored clothes. Even the poor wore suits, vests, tie, hat and long sleeves.

If you want to be a space marine, learn to work with fibreglass, or get good at painting cardboard to look like metal. You will probably still need a fabric structure to support the armour plates.

So Where’s My How-To-Sew Book?

I can’t find a book that covers the sort of things I want to learn to sew, with pictures that match what I want them to look like. I know it is possible.

In amongst all the books on journalling and mixed-media art that I’ve collected over the years, I have one written by and for blokes. It’s called The Journal Junkies Workshop by Eric Scott and David Modler. The gender difference is obvious in both the art and the writing styles. The subtitle is visual ammunition for the art addict. It is less cutesy, and more dramatic. More scratchy than soft. I don’t know how well it sold. I don’t know how many blokes even look in that section of the bookshops.

There is at least one book – Switch Craft by Alison Lewis – on building electronics into clothing and other textiles. There’s an obvious potential overlap between the blokey interest in building stuff and the use of sewing machines. Yet even Lewis’ book is intentionally, obviously cutesy and girly. It’s not blokey enough for me, and I’m not the most beer-swilling of blokes. I bought it anyway, but it sits on the shelf unread (the electronics shelf this time, not the sewing shelf which is far away in a different room). It clearly is designed to introduce women to electronics, not to introduce sewing to engineers.

Publishers struggle with crossing genre boundaries. Authors are encouraged to write what their market is looking for, rather than risking the attempt to open new markets, even though opening new markets is the only place where real fortunes are made.

Maybe there will never be a book for blokey men to learn blokey sewing. We are an under-represented minority. Maybe we all have to get together and write it on-line. Maybe we need a website that collects links to cool male-friendly designs, with rating systems so blokes can see what other blokes thought of them, and what problems they found. Like PatternReview, but blokey. Maybe it already exists and I just haven’t found it.

Perhaps this ‘opting out’ of the general sewing enthusiast community sounds sexist, so I’ll give an anecdote that may put this in some sort of perspective.

Years ago, my wife took a class called ‘Woodworking for Women’. Taught by a woman, exclusively to women. They felt supported and understood. They felt ok about freaking out when the big bench saw fired up in noise and clouds of sawdust. They didn’t feel judged for not knowing how things worked – like what a file was for, or how to set a plane. They felt ok asking for help. They came away with an elegant piece of furniture that they had made with power tools and their own hands, which made them feel proud each time they looked at it. And there were no insecure men there to say that women were no good at woodwork.

I’d go to a ‘Sewing for Blokes’ class in a heartbeat, if it was taught by a bloke.

This morning, instead of doing more printer tests, I smeared some bronze metallic acrylic paint over the calibration cube from the night before, so I could see the surface texture better. That showed up some under-extrusion in the top layers. Hmm.

I’ve never painted one of my 3D prints before, for some reason. Maybe because I’ve been feeling that it would be ‘cheating’ to do post-processing on the prints. Somehow I was set on the idea that the output of the printer should be the final object, perfect in every way. Which is silly. And typical of the untested assumptions and self-imposed ‘rules’ I seem to pick up without noticing.

Since the world didn’t end when I dared to put paint on my little piece of home-made plastic, I decided to really ‘push the envelope’.

I grabbed a plastic bottle of black student-grade acrylic. Turns out that it has been sitting on my shelf for so long the pigment had separated from the clear binder medium. Never mind. Vigorous shaking of bottle ensues. I pour some out into a small bowl and stir the binder and pigment back together.

Next thing I grab is two human science fiction figures, Prance Vichard and Space Girl, both created by dutchmogul (aka Arian Croft). He designed them as part of a printable science fiction miniatures game, where they were supposed to be 28mm high. That’s the standard size for most metal miniatures used for tabletop roleplaying games and some wargames.

My printer doesn’t have the resolution to make a human look good at that size. And my eyesight and shaky hands couldn’t paint them that small anyway. That’s why I don’t collect those metal miniatures anymore. So I scaled the STL models up in size to where they were more like 140mm tall, like some ‘action figures’ and fan collectibles. That’s a major advantage of a 3D printer right there: rescalable toys.

dutchmogul provided the figures in two parts, sliced down the vertical plane between front and back, so you print them horizontally. That gets around the problem of unsupported overhangs like chins. They printed fine. I glued the parts together with some superglue. (I wonder whether acrylic medium would be strong enough, since I know that mixed-media artists sometimes build assemblage art using acrylic medium in place of glue.) Then I put them in a drawer and forgot about them for months. They still seem to be thoroughly glued together, so the glue worked.

I used a cheap, stiff long-bristled paintbrush to apply the black acrylic, scuffing it into the nooks and crannies. The characteristic surface texture of the layers is really obvious under the brush, and working with the layers instead of across them seems to work best for smoothing the coverage out.

While the paint was wet it wicked itself into an effect that looked like a wash – where the pigment collects in the crevices and cracks as if deepening the shadows, leaving the high bits as pale highlights. Once it dried, that effect disappeared and the paint finish looked much better than I expected.

The thin coat of paint makes it much easier to see the surface detail than the translucence of unpainted clear PLA . The satin finish adds some sheen without looking like those old Britains glossy toy soldiers. I think I could really start to like the layered nature of the prints. Very Mechanistic. We’ll see how it works when I try to put some coloured detail over the top.

Space Girl by dutchmogul printed by brazenartificePrance Vichard by dutchmogul printed by brazenartifice

Making music has never been easier than it is now. With the power of modern tablets or even smartphones, the range of sounds available is immense. I’ve been playing with Caustic 2 on my android tablet, and it’s amazing. Powerful, predictable, musical.

But touchscreen interfaces feel soulless, slick and virtual. There’s no texture to them, no physical feedback through the tips of the fingers. And no opportunity to create weird-science artefacts.

Analogue Sounds

Building electronic musical instruments from scratch is not a new idea. Back before digital circuitry took over the world, people built amazing and often huge sound-makers using analogue circuitry. They were finicky beasts – expensive, fragile, temperamental and hard to keep in tune if the temperature changed. And they tended to be able to only make one note at a time, so multi-track tape recording and huge amounts of patience were needed to produce any sort of music.

My first exposure to that sort of music was Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 album Oxygene. I played that cassette tape over and over as a teenager. Then I moved to the city where live performance pub rock was king. Digital keyboards took over from the analog monsters.

But there are still people devoted to the analogue ways of synthesising sounds. People still build analogue systems from scratch with soldering irons and wooden enclosures. Ironically, the retro appeal of analogue synth sounds has now become so intense that most digital software synths emulate the old analogue systems in software.

Analogue Sounds from Digital Chips

The simplest and cheapest way to make your own electronic noisemaker is to pervert the use of digital logic chips. The integrated circuits that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s to build the first desktop computers are really cheap now. Like one dollar each cheap.

For around a dollar you can buy a single IC that can produce six independent sounds at the same time. Chuck in a few more chips and you can be building sequencers to control the rhythms, modulate the sound quality by waving your hands about, and cause random chaotic sounds that may be more industrial or arcade-game than musical.

The secret is a series of techniques taught by a guy called Stanley Lunetta back in the early 1970s. The chips were not so cheap then, but it was still cheaper than any other way of doing it. Enthusiasts have taken his insights into the pervertable brilliance of digital chips and taken the whole idea to new heights.

The internet home of this subculture is the Lunettas subforum at electro-music.com. There is a thread full of useful links, and a thread full of images and sound samples, amongst lots of discussion. The really cool thing is that as well as constantly discovering new ways to make strange noises, the practice really seems to encourage the creation of strange and beautiful user interfaces too. Many of these things really are Weird Science artefacts. So even if you don’t like the noises, maybe you’ll love the boxes people put them in. I do!

CMOS Synth Resources

As well as the electro-music.com forums, there are lots of other good sources for this stuff. Here are a few of my favourites.

Nic Collins‘ book Handmade Electronic Music has been a starting point for many folks with no electronics experience. The second edition, which I have, has a DVD of him demonstrating the circuits and techniques, and almost 90 minutes of video of other people’s creations using similar techniques.

Beavis Audio Research also has a beautifully presented intro to CMOS Synthesizers. It assumes you can understand electronic schematics.

Gallery of Extreme User-Interface Designs

Most of these images have come from the Let’s see your Lunetta thread from electro-music.com. Some are from elsewhere. Sorry for the lack of attribution – I’ve left the filenames as I found them in the hope that you can find the originals by searching if you want to learn more about how they were created. And I hope you can see why I contrast the physical nature of these machines with the shiny slickness of making music on a tablet.

We’ve just come back from the SteamFest 2013 Steampunk weekend festival at Ipswich near Brisbane, in Queensland Australia. Great Fun! Masses of quirkily clad folks with oodles of skill and imagination. Lots of stalls selling all sorts of steamy fashion items and accessories. Great music from the likes of Abney Park and Rapskallion. Lots of people taking photos of each other’s wonderful costumes. Continue reading SteamFest Ipswich 2013 Steampunk weekend of fashion, music and adventure→

Last night something reminded me of hand-drawn treasure maps. X marks the spot. And Here be Dragons. I used to see them a lot in the sort of books I read as a kid in the sixties and seventies. Pirate maps, fantasy maps (Hyboria, Lemuria, Middle Earth…), science fiction maps (Barsoom and others), tropical archipelagos with seaplanes flying the mail routes between them. And especially the maps in Arthur Ransome’s wonderful Swallows and Amazons stories.